I answered that Groovy uses Java’s regular expression support and adds a few nifty features of its own to make regular expressions easier to apply.

RegexDemo I’ve created the RegexDemo application to demonstrate Java’s regular expressions and the various methods located in the Pattern, Matcher, and PatternSyntaxException classes.

One can achieve the same result using one or two lines of regular expression replacement, but the retort was that regular expressions, or regex, are notoriously slow. That's generally true.